Then let’s get started. My idea of a fantastic trip is access to world class art and sufficient time to look at it closely and at length. No haste, no dashing through the marble halls. Not everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, so consider yourself warned. Quality beats quantity, though the more at bats you get, the better your odds are of finding art that’s life changing, work that leaves you vibrating like a bell that’s been struck.

I’ll write about the impetus for these journeys, the planning, the eager anticipation and the doubts at 3am, culminating in my boots on the ground experience. Along the way I expect to be frequently surprised, unexpectedly delighted, and occasionally dismayed. If my luck holds, resilience and gratitude will see me through.

Beginning the countdown to a trip to the Louvre, starting April Fools Day and ending Easter Sunday, followed by a ten day visit to the Rijksmuseum. Alert travelers will note that the Louvre Museum is in Paris, so this is also going to include time in the gardens, mean streets, cafes and bistros of the City of Light, and the canals, condom museums and street markets of Amsterdam.

The most important thing about this post is the link to the musician and creator of the Make Time image I’ve borrowed, with his permission. Thanks, Marshall. Make_Time

Last June was my 63rd birthday, the age of my mother when she died. Thinking about about how much time I’ve got left and how I want to spend it, fueled this particular trip.

There I was on the couch, Googling St.Petersburg, wondering if my deep itch to visit the Hermitage was serious enough to deal with what it would require of me in terms of Russian bureaucracy, expense, and stamina. One thought led to another, and I recalled wistfully how I’d wanted to spend a month in the Louvre. It is to this painter, what the Vatican is to a nun, the epicenter of what my world spins around.

In my daydream, I’d rent an apartment close enough to walk. In the morning I’d stroll along the Seine, my sketchbook in my bag, and when the guards invited me to leave at the end of the day, I’d limp back, gorged on art, a baguette under my arm.

True, I am not a huge fan of Parisians – they are a little on the cranky, hyper-caffeinated side, like most striving citizens in major international cities – but compared to the strain of putting together a trip to Russia, no big deal.

At that moment, in one of those serendipitous, coincidental nudges from fate, my husband brought in the mail and dropped a postcard on my lap that read “Would you like to have your own home in Paris for a week, a month or…”

The idea caught fire right away. I did the math on the rental, versus the B&Bs I usually choose. I clocked the distance to the Louvre both on foot and by Metro. I think that’s the travel equivalent of mentally placing your furniture in rooms when you go house-hunting.

An intense week followed – deciding on dates, the inclusion of Amsterdam/ the Rjiksmuseum, shopping flights looking for the best possible combination of Skymiles and $$, culminating in an April Fool’s departure and May 1 return.

What they call pre-production in the film biz is my favorite part of getting ready for a trip. The life-long-library-loving journalist quadrant of my brain adores research. This is research plus anticipation. What’s not to love?

My modus operandi is to spend a couple of days comparing flights for optimal comfort /minimal expense, and scour TripAdvisor.com for potential accommodations, with a strong preference for B&Bs. Once I pull the trigger on the rooms and flights, I drill down: scan travel sites, compare guide books, watch travel shows, read novels set in the destination city, follow travel blogs, create a music playlist, Google map my way from where I’m staying to museums and other attractions. From that information, I craft detailed daily itineraries, with rain versus shine options. It’s total immersion and a tad obsessive. Okay, more than a tad.

One of the great pleasures of planning the trip is Imagining my adventure in detail. A novelist might call it world building. Nothing is sweeter… until I go a little crazy from trying to anticipate every possible variable and slide into the delusion that I can control said variables. That way lies misery. Here’s the deal I make with myself. I get to plan and prepare and visualize all I want, but then I get out of the results business. Accept absolutely that I cannot control the outcome. What I can influence, is my attitude. As Rick Steves famously suggests, “If things are not to your liking, change your liking.”

Which brings me to the apps. As part of my research, I wanted to track down books about the Louvre. After much fumbling around in the library, Barnes & Noble and online, I wised up. I realized I was looking on the wrong shelf, so to speak. I hit paydirt in the app store.

I downloaded two iPad/iPhone app guides to the Louvre, https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/louvre-audioguide/id526191255?mt=8 and two to the recently renovated and expanded Rijksmuseum. The museum guides are free, by the way – go to the museum websites or straight to iTunes. HD images of gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous art. If you have an ipad, check it out.

I opted to set up a My Louvre account on the museums website, as well as sign up for e-newletters from the Rijks. I’ve become a friend of the Louvre, Oui, je suis un card-carrying ami des Louvre. Not only does that put my money where my heart is, it entitles me to free entry to the museum for a year.

Last summer as I blew out my 63 birthday candles, I decided to figure out, STAT, what I wanted to do in the time I have left. I need to front load the next ten years with any adventures that require good health and working vision. Or kiss them goodbye. Not taking aging into account is a decision too.

I’ve been saying for the last decade, ‘I’m going while my knees can still bend and my eyes can still see.” I was kind of kidding. Not any more. But why Paris?

In 2007 I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for five uninterrupted days, with an afternoon detour to the Frick. It was a delicious experience, a painter’s dream. I had the time of my life. I left Manhattan on fire with the idea of spending a month at the Louvre. But life got in the way, the dream languished and eventually faded. Whenever my desire to immerse myself in the Louvre surfaced, I’d think of all the reasons it was not a good idea. The expense, my lack of French, the debilitating stress of a transcontinental flight, the challenge of finding a dogsitter, the physical demands of walking all day, and the risks of traveling solo while both elderly and female.

Plus, Paris and I have a complicated relationship. I lived there in the early seventies, a young and heedless hippie-turned-model. I see Paris as imperious, temperamental, supremely egotistical, casually mendacious and a oui bit on the cynical side. And yet, she is heartbreakingly beautiful and brave. I left her for London. I’ve made a few visits in the subsequent decades and we reached a détente, but we are both wary.

What turned me around was reading a throwaway line of a minor character in a romance novel, who says she wants to see Paris once again before she dies. Mind you, she is robust, bossy woman, who makes this statement to get her own way.

It resonated. What I realized is it doesn’t matter whether or not the trip is all I want it to be. I don’t want to look back in ten years and think, I wish I had gone, but I let my doubts and fears stop me. I may or may not love the experience that awaits me, but I will for sure regret not making this trip. By the act of going, it’s already a win.

I cast a wide net when it comes to learning about Paris. History, novels, memoir, essay, blog and facebook posts – they all have their uses. I use paper, ipod and e-book and app. It’s as much about ambiance as education. Let the reading begin.

The Sweet Life in Paris, by blogger and pastry chef David Lebovitz, http://www.davidlebovitz.com. Read via ebook. Honest and funny, plus recipes. Go to his blog for top ten delicious things to eat in Paris. I just burned two hours reading his experiences in restaurants and checking their proximity to my apartment via Google Maps. Downloading his puff pastry app right now.

Paris In Love, a memoir by Eloisa James. Read via ebook. She writes historical romances. Swoon. But she’s also Mary Bly, a Shakespeare professor at Fordham University with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, so smart, right? She and her professor husband took sabbaticals, sold their house, sold their cars, uprooted their kids and ran away to live in Paris for a year. This is an abbreviated account of that year, partially salvaged from her blog and Facebook posts. I enjoyed it immensely.

Back to the pleasure of the iPod, I downloaded a couple of classics, The Hunchback of Notre–Dame by Victor Hugo, and Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. I’ve read them in my distant past, and wanted to listen to them while I walked miles at the gym, training for the rigors of walking ten hours a day in Paris.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. I read in 1973, when I lived in a garret in Paris. It ruined me for the rest of his work – I much prefer it to his novels – and stamped Paris in my mind forever as an epicenter of writers and artists.

In years past I used a small point and shoot Cannon. After dropping and demolishing one camera on a stone floor in Venice, I attached a stout elastic cord for as a camera strap. Long enough to loop across my body, and tuck in a pants or jacket pocket, and stretchy enough to manipulate into any position. That means the camera is always ready to use – not buried in a tote or locked down in a case. It doesn’t get left behind on a table, nor it is vulnerable to theft by pickpockets.

This year I’m using a Sony RX100, which I recently acquired thanks to my appreciation of the amazingly detailed images captured by my friend Dan. This camera came with a narrow, adjustable strap that functions like my handmade ones. Bonus! Along with the camera, I’ll bring the charger, and two memory chips. I lost a chip once (Venice again). Nothing like having 400 photos of Rome poof! vanished! to convince this lazy artist to back up or risk losing everything. I’ll back up the chips on my MacAir and an online photo site.

I consider my iPhone 5S as much a camera as a communication device. I use Camera Plus, along with Hipstamatic and Instagram apps. One of the advantages – besides the fact you always have your phone with you- is it’s less intrusive than a camera.

If you really want to be stealthy, you can attach your iPod earbuds, click the control switch on the cable, and it will take images remotely.

Those images will be backed up on the Cloud and on my MacAir. Hooray for photo stream. The downside is the drain on the phone battery, which doesn’t last anything like as long as the camera battery. I have a Mophie juice pack air case (http://www.mophie.com/shop/battery-cases/juice-pack-air-iphone-5) for my iPhone, which doubles my battery life, and an additional auxiliary battery pack for the iPhone, which extends use from hours to days. It fits in my pocket and attaches by a cable. Not quite as sleek an arrangement as I’d like, but invaluable at, say 5pm, when you come across the ideal image or need to call Uber, and the juice has run out.

I sketch every day when I travel. I draw on the backs of postcards I send to my family, and I draw in sketchbooks.

I have particular preferences. I want paper of sufficient weight (so pen and ink won’t bleed through), and a bit of texture, or tooth. I like spiral binding, so each page can lay flat, not bowed up. Toned paper in a warm tan works best with a variety of mediums – graphite, ink pens, charcoal, earth toned Conté crayons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cont%C3%A9 and white chalk for highlights.

I can fit stubs of pencils, Conté and chalk, a small sharpener and a kneaded eraser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneaded_eraser inside an old plastic cassette tape cover. It slips under the heavy rubber band that keeps the sketchbook closed.Compact, handy and works like a charm. In years past the other requirement is that the dimension of the sketchbook be small enough to fit into my Longchamps mini-backpack.

Clockwise from top 1. Bought in Vienna – love that red and a nice elastic closure, but the paper is so thin you can see a pencil mark through it and blindingly while. 2. Lovely gift book with heavy, handmade, deckle-edged paper, hand stitched in a leather cover, but it’s unwieldy and weighs a ton. 3. My first sketchbook, a classic moleskine, well used and well-loved, but teeny tiny. 4.Toned paper, a comfortable size, but the spine has to be cracked for it to lie flat.

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My favorite sketchbooks (postcards on left for scale). Toned paper with a hint of texture, spiral binding, sturdy and lightweight. Note cassette tape box with pencils, crayons, eraser and sharpener.

This trip I wanted to try a larger sketchbook. What held me back was the transportation issue. I considered tying cord to the ends of the wire spiral so I could sling it over my shoulder, until Robert pointed out it would bend the wire. Then I came across a lightweight, waterproof, sturdy satchel with adjustable shoulder strap and a single pocket inside that perfectly fits a 9×12″ toned, spiral bound sketchbook. I felt like I had struck gold. The graphic pattern works with the wardrobe I have planned for this trip (black and pewter with pops of Schiaparelli pink) . Eureka!

I like an organized trip folder for maps, info about my accommodations, lists of places to eat, parks and museums, transportation particulars, itineraries (by day and week, rain and shine versions). I include tips and tricks re: local customs, copies of important documents like my passport and insurance card, and a short list of courtesy words, since I am pathetically monolingual. You may think I am wee bit on the compulsive side of data gathering. I prefer to think of it as a bespoke travel guide.

A couple of days ago I spread out all the information I’ve collected on Paris and Amsterdam. I used our biggest coffee table, since Robert commandeered the dining room table for taxes.

I consolidated and discarded and snapped holes for a three ring binder, my usual MO. After a few days of sorting, it looks like this (below). Upper left is the Amsterdam folder, the Paris folder is open on the right. Newly printed maps in the center.

Today I compiled and cross-referenced lists of cafes, restaurants, bistros, and foodie street markets from my sources – recommendations from friends, Time Out Paris online, TripAdvisor, memoirs, blogs, and random suggestions. I created a personal Google map of the most promising places in the areas I expect to frequent. I printed out a couple of versions – one with the detailed list of name address and description, one that’s just the venue name and address. While I was in the ring with Google maps, (which I can make work, but it’s not pretty) I made another for parks and small museums. If I had better Google Map skills, I’d figure out how to do this in layers, but comparing the printouts side by side gives me a decent overview. If there is a church, a museum, a park, and a bisto/cafe all nearby, I’m golden.

I’ll have one or the other with me when I hit the streets. Sure, I should be able to find the map using my phone, and work out navigation, but – you never know. Batteries run down. Also, staring down at my phone is the opposite of being present in the Parisian moment. I can glance at a bit of folded paper in my hand and go forth, taking it all in. Belt and suspenders, that’s me.

I’d have four weeks done if I wasn’t so distracted by the Louvre’s website. http://musee.louvre.fr/oal/scribe/indexEN.html. Checking out A Closer Look (videos of a specific work discussed in a historical and artistic context) and the various Louvre Trails (themed ninety minute audio tours) was fascinating. I selected a few Trails (Mighty Aphrodite, Alexander the Great, Lion Hunt, In Search Of Ideal Beauty) to plug in, though I reserve the right to turn left into any open door.

On days the street markets are open, I added churches and parks that are nearby. Street markets and parks are fair weather options only. It can be chilly, but not wet or bitter cold – that’s under 45 degrees for this southern woman.

My detailed agenda is not set in stone. It’s not a schedule, it’s more like a list of tempting possibilities I can follow or ignore, depending upon my whim. That’s one of the beauties of solo travel. You can pick up the pace or slack off at will. In a city like Paris, where there are more wonderful things to do than there are hours in the day, my itinerary serves more as a filter than a must see/do list.